Charged particle beam apparatuses are used in a plurality of industrial fields. Inspection of semiconductor devices during manufacturing, exposure systems for lithography, detecting devices and testing systems are only some of these fields.
In general, there is a high demand for structuring and inspecting specimens within the micrometer or nanometer scale. On such a small scale, process control, inspection or structuring is often done with charged particle beams, e.g. electron beams, which are generated and focused in charged particle beam devices such as electron microscopes or electron beam pattern generators. Charged particle beams offer superior spatial resolution compared to, e.g. photon beams due to their short wavelengths.
Generally, charged particle beam devices are operated under vacuum conditions to avoid, e.g. ionization of surrounding gases. An insufficient vacuum leads e.g. to formation of hydrocarbons, which can accumulate at apertures and other components. A deposition of these hydrocarbons can restrain the functionality of components, as e.g. detectors or of apertures.
For this and other reasons, maintenance of charged particle devices is frequently required. However, especially for online inspection systems or other systems used within a production line, the availability of devices is a key issue. Thus, the system throughput can be increased if the maintenance time or the maintenance frequency is decreased.
Since there is a strong requirement for increasing the throughput of charged particle beam devices and decreasing the costs for production lines, state of the art devices should be further improved.